In a distributed computing environment, multiple physical and software resources are combined and interconnected to support one or more applications. Consequently, planning, deploying, and managing a solution or application within a distributed computing environment can be challenging. In many cases, deploying a new application is a time consuming and error prone process that must be repeated for each software deployment.
To deploy a new application in a distributed computing environment, appropriate software images, hardware, storage and network resources must be identified. Additionally the topology must be designed, work load characteristics collected and performance expectations defined. Where an application is relocated or redeployed, the entire process is repeated.